My first comment/question in not in any way an attack on Mr. Weisberg. In reading the title to his article I was spurred to think first we must determine what is American so that we may determine what is truly American. You have to actually think about that for a second. There is no cut and dry answer except to say American as an ideology can not be pinned down. It has changed over the 200+ years this country has been trucking, and it is more convoluted now than before the telegraph even though we have "advanced" communications-wise so much from that time. Just an observation.
The author is right that Fox News is blatantly right-wing. There is no arguing that, although I do take exception with this portion of his piece. "Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity." So since Mr. Weisberg is singling out Fox News and not MSNBC or CNN I take that to mean that to at least some extent he is exonerating every network that is not Fox News. I find fault with that assertion. Number one neither CNN nor MSNBC are very balanced, making the odds stacked against Fox News 2-1. Number two, was presidential criticism handled fairly by either of those two networks when President Bush was still in office? They basically called him stupid stubborn with regularity. There was no integrity in that criticism. None.
Follow along after the jump if I have not bored you enough yet.
Weisberg's placing of blame on Fox News for MSNBC and CNN's actions is not correct. There news managers and producers shoulder the responsibility for their content alone. I have already written that Fox News is outnumbered two to one by the other two news networks so why can we not say that Fox News is balancing instead of balanced.
Multiple uses of italics. And in reality Fox News is annoying and I can not watch it much. It does serve a purpose, though.
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